North Korea Threatens South Korea Over 13 Defectors

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Tuesday accused South Korea of kidnapping 13 of its citizens who had been working in a restaurant in China, and it demanded their repatriation.

The response was the first by North Korea to a highly unusual group defection last week. The 13 North Koreans were the largest single group to defect to South Korea during Kim Jong-un’s reign. Mr. Kim has been trying to stem the flow of North Koreans fleeing to the South.

South Korea welcomed the restaurant workers’ defection last week as a major coup and quickly dismissed North Korea’s demand that they be returned.

South Korean officials said that United Nations sanctions were squeezing the revenues of restaurants and other enterprises that North Korea operates abroad to earn badly needed cash. North Korean trade officials, diplomats and workers abroad are finding it increasingly hard to meet the government-set goals in earning foreign currency, the officials said, and some are tempted to defect rather than be recalled home for punishment.

On Tuesday, North Korea said the South’s intelligence agents “lured and abducted” the 13 North Koreans by using “all sorts of appeasement, deception and gimmicks.”

“Unless they apologize for the hideous abduction and send those abductees back, they will face unimaginable serious consequences and severe punishment,” a spokesman for the North’s Red Cross Society was quoted as saying by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry said the North Koreans had defected of their own free will.

Mr. Kim’s government has also been trying to make up for lost revenues in arms sales and other activities that are banned under United Nations sanctions by increasing the number of workers it sends abroad to earn cash. Under Mr. Kim, the number of North Korean restaurants in 12 countries has grown to 130, a majority of them in China, South Korean officials said.

They earn around $10 million a year, much of it from South Korean tourists cherishing an opportunity to sample North Korean food and music.

The North Korean government was believed to have selected loyal and relatively affluent citizens to send abroad as workers, assuming that they would be less vulnerable to foreign influence. The 13 defectors — 12 women and a male supervisor — are children of the North’s party and administration elites. They were sent to China to raise money needed to complete the 105-floor Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, Daily NK, a website based in Seoul, South Korea, reported on Tuesday, quoting sources within the North.

“If North Korea persists in its wrong path, like its nuclear weapons development, this kind of incident will continue to happen in the future,” South Korea’s foreign minister, Yun Byung-se, warned in a speech on Tuesday, referring to the group defection.

Many details of the defection remain unknown, including how the restaurant workers were able to plot their escape while under constant surveillance by supervisors. They had also been trained to spy on one another for signs of disloyalty. South Korean officials said the male supervisor appeared to have played a crucial role in the defection.

The defectors left China last Wednesday and arrived in South Korea the following day, traveling through Thailand.

On Tuesday, North Korea did not hide its discontent with Beijing, saying that it knew “which country connived” to enable the group defection.

Lu Kang, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, had earlier distanced China from the case, saying that the restaurant workers carried valid travel documents and left China “normally.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: North Korea Threatens South Over 13 Defectors. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe